Last week, I came across a piece by Sarah Lyall in the Times about an English mystery-writer, Janice Hallett — I hadn’t heard of her — who has much of spent of her life as a writer-for-hire, with a specialty in beauty-aid copy. When Hallett  tried her hand at screenplays, she was urged to write a novel. The result was a bit success in Britain. Intrigued, I ordered The Appeal, which came out in 2021. While I can’t imagine how it could be adapted for film, I am fascinated by Hallett’s successful overhaul of the classic Agatha Christie model.

As is the case with those great entertainments, not much can be said about The Appeal without spilling clues, so this will be brief. The first thing to note is that the omniscient observer, dribbling out details about the weather and the library wallpaper, has been dismissed, leaving us with a mass of first-person email and text. The unreliability of this evidence is palpable, as the smiling ironies of unwitting self-disclosure cavort like cherubs over the surface of suspicious testimony composed by people whose eyes have not really read what their hands have written:

Marianne: Stay safe, Joyce. Don’t get involved.
Joyce: I won’t. I’m on my way there now (128)

When another woman, the hyper-organized Sarah-Jane MacDonald, is obliged at one point to dictate a text while driving, the resulting garble is such fun to read — her son, Harley, is referred to as “Harlem” — that I hoped that Hallett would repeat the stunt. Later, Sarah-Jane replies to an importuning text by writing, “You were standing right here only moments ago. Why not just speak to me?” (218)

This stream of communications is produced by the members of an amateur theatrical company in the West of England, plus assorted friends and relations. Currently in production is Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Hallett’s choice of play here is not insignificant, but it could really be anything, since it is gossip about casting and rehearsals that elicits the email, a topic that is presently joined by an awful crisis, the need to provide very expensive treatment for a cancer victim that inspires a crowdfunding campaign. Gossip’s virtuosity at converting unpremeditated “whoppers” into established truths will provide the attentive reader with more than enough amusement to forestall the tedium suspected by one of the more copious email writers, who says at the end that it must have been “boring to read so many words.”

When I wasn’t thinking of Jane Austen or Mrs Gaskell, I had Wilkie Collins in mind. In The Moonstone, Collins gave the world the unforgettable creature, unforgettably named as well, of Drusilla Clack, whose misapprehensions about the welcome of her proselytizing almost make her bearable. More than a few of the contributors to The Appeal would die of congestive blushing if they could read the novel through our eyes. Better yet, they might die of shame at having quite literally walked onstage naked.

To corral the morass of inputs, Hallett has framed them in a series of chats between two young lawyers, or “clerks,” who have been assigned by their boss to read it all with fresh eyes. The boss (a QC) has come to have second thoughts about the conviction in a case that he prosecuted a while back, and he has chosen to test his hypothesis by distributing the evidence in select tranches. There is a good deal of information that he withholds from his juniors at the start, but in the end their agreement with his hunch shows that the evidence supports a more compelling conclusion than the easy, obvious one. Nothing is more satisfying — this hasn’t changed since Christie’s day — than having figured out who done it before the final pages. The cover of my paperback edition urges you to try. So do I.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans, is a useful book. Reading it, I thought of it as a sort of Plutarch’s Lives of the Nazis. In the ordinary course of reading history, we are obliged to compose, in our own mind, the full story of each leading player’s career (in this case, from 1918 to 1945), as it unspools alongside all the others’ lives. Here, conveniently, we are given a set of detached, complete biographies that does the job for us. There are 22 chapters, covering 24 lives. The chapters are grouped in four sections: The Leader, The Paladins, The Enforcers, and The Instruments. (Two of the chapters in the final section are split between two subjects.) The seasoned reader will be familiar with all or most of the names in the first three sections. The characters singled out as Instruments are meant to be representative: thus Karl Brandt stands in for medical doctors who rationalized atrocious experiments by claiming that their victims were not human, and Leni Riefenstahl sees herself as an artist who intended no one any harm, notwithstanding intense collusion in the creation of the Reich’s image — the mistress of the Wagner festivals at Bayreuth, the composer’s daughter-in-law, Winifred, could have served the same purpose.

The Leader, Adolf Hitler, gets about a fifth of Evans’s attention; while most biographies here range between fifteen and  twenty-five pages, Hitler’s goes on for a hundred. It functions as a pocket history of the rise and fall of the Reich at its core. Unappeasable resentment and uninhibited violence were its perpetual engines, always churning behind appearances, such as the hearty revival of the Fatherland and the pretended normalization of diplomatic engagements; and activities, such as the bold (or rash or reckless) conduct of the war and the methodical extermination of undesirable people. Given Hitler’s complete lack of capacity for painstaking planning, the core was bound to explode sooner or later; Evans is very clear: after 1941, Germany was at war with enemies that, owing to their vastly superior resources, it could never hope to defeat.

It is interesting that almost everyone in Hitler’s People comes from what in English is called the lower middle-class but is more appropriately thought of as the petite (or petty) bourgeoisie, educated but neither professional nor academic. This class was particularly bedeviled by the hyperinflation of the early Twenties and the loss of respectability (or caste) that it threatened. In any case, education did nothing to inspire Nazi sympathizers to transcend the sentimental nationalism that was humiliated by the peculiar outcome of World War I. There were a few semi-plausible aristocrats among the Paladins and the Enforcers, such as Ribbentrop and Papen, but no workers. Workers, drawn on the whole to the Left, could not compete with the Nazis’ pretenses to cultural vitality; it has not been forgotten that Hitler and his entourage drew great strength from their prim distaste for the experimental and the outré. Theirs was a regime of insufferable Babbitry.

I have two quibbles with Hitler’s People. The minor one is with the book’s lack of an independent time-line, a handy list of the the inflection points to which Evans refers again and again, such as the Kristallnacht of 1938, This would save the reader a fair amount of repetition and a good deal of authorial heavy-breathing. It serves no purpose to be reminded that these events, which range from the Reichstag Fire to the Wannsee Conference were horrific and/or had horrific consequences.

My major quibble is not unrelated to the minor one. There is a lot of scolding in this book. This is tedious of course, but also questionable. Human-rights violations may be unconscionable, but in the context of war, who is to say that their perpetrators are punishable? Several conflicts in the world today suggest that such violations may be tools to victory, or at least to quiescence. Ever since the dawn of Western imperialism, European minds have been addicted to imposing their provincial mores on the rest of the world, as if channeling a “greatness” of ancient Greek and Roman thought that often turns out to be spurious. I find that it behooves the historian who would influence intelligent minds to curb the impulse to sermonize.

As I say, though, Hitler’s People is a useful book, and genuinely useful books are as rare as great ones.

Ordinary Human Failings is an ingenious novel that masks its significance in its format. It starts out with what seems to be the makings of a sensational tabloid story, and its narrative framework follows  the attempt of journalist Tom Hargreaves to extract that story from the family that’s likely to be responsible for it. His efforts consist of sequestering the family at a comfortable but out-of-the-way hotel in North London, and plying them with drink (if they’ll have it) until they tell him what he wants to know. But they never do, while at the same time the murder charge at the heart of the whole thing evaporates. Tom is left with nothing; there is no sensational story. Instead, there is the actuality of weakness and disappointment — and hope. too — as the members of the clan tell their stories, which are far from malignant, and only too human.

There are four people in the Green family, although the youngest, ten year-old Lucy, has been brought into police custody as the possible, indeed likely, murderer of a three year-old girl living in the same council estate. There is Carmel, Lucy’s mother. There is Richie, Carmel’s half-brother. And there is John, the father of both of them. In the background lurks the ghost of Rose Green, whose recent death appears to have deprived the others of the family’s cohesion.

The blighting of Carmel’s teen-aged hopes is the reason for the family’s living in London. Rose brought her daughter over from Waterford to obtain an abortion, but by the time she discovered that Carmel was pregnant, it was too late to do anything about it. Carmel refused to return to Ireland, so Rose summoned her husband and stepson.

We learn that Carmel was not foolish to fall in love with a thoughtful and good-natured young man who nurtured her intelligence. Hers was not  the tale of the silly girl seduced by a villain. No; it is not that old story. Rather,

It felt to them both that she had skipped some essential moment. She had gone from never having a boyfriend, only a few tepid kisses with nobodies, to the strange emotional sophistication she seemed now to inhabit. She had missed in a pivotal stage of agonizing and awkwardness which usually characterized early liaisons, straight to the strikingly adult  frankness she was addressing him with now. (68)

She studies for exams at his flat.

She sat up in his bed with the books in her lap and cupped her hands to shield her eyes from his body. His body lay the other way, feet up beside her and head and dangling off the edge of the mattress. He held a novel aloft to read from. They had come to this arrangement to minimize the chance of them distracting one another. When she suggested that she just study at home if they weren’t going to really be together on these nights, he looked offended and she loved him for it. She knew herself why it was worth it, why they couldn’t waste the chance to be near each other even when they couldn’t speak or touch. (72)

But however nice, he is not extraordinary; he jumps at the chance to take a better job in Dublin, and he leaves her shortly before she finds out that he has also left the worst sort of souvenir. The new life inside her becomes the tomb of all her shining hopes.

The stories of her half-brother, Richie, and her father, John, are not so heartbreaking, but both have been struck by disappointments so severe that they have simply given up any plans for doing more than getting through the day. Richie, as a weak but not insensible drunk, has been his own disappointment.

The year elapsed and still nothing happened to suggest a course of action. He was surprised that no event had occurred to shape the future, but not unduly alarmed. (121)

John has been more than disappointed — shocked — first by an industrial accident that cost him the use of an arm and then by the desertion of his first wife. It does not take long for Tom Hargreaves to outrage him.

That was what sex had done to him, to his life, to his family. And now this newspaper fellow sat there wanting to shoot the breeze about how it all worked? He was asking and asking about Lucy’s father, asking about Richie and Carmel sharing a room. What was he getting at? They shared a room because there were only the two bedrooms. He tried to explain the layout of the house to him, he was telling him facts about the condition the place was in when he first bought it, he was saying he would love to get back over to it, and he spoke this way until he was asleep and snoring. (171)

What makes these stories interesting rather than pathetic is the tellers’ awareness of consciousness, which is often an uncertainty about how far it reaches, both in themselves and in the other members of the family, or, in Tom’s case, plain awareness of other people. Again and again, they are aware of not knowing how far consciousness, their own or another’s reaches.

Here is Carmel:

She realized with a spark of quick shame that she did not have an intuitive sense of what level of cognition Lucy was operating under when it came to such matters. (108)

Here is Richie:

That system lasted a while, until he had been in London a year and it became clear that the fresh start had been no such thing and none of his attempts to make a life for himself had been, or were going to be, successful. (101)

Here is Tom:

He wanted to approach Richie in the spirit of peers, lads together, but didn’t know what his levels of sensitivity were. (111)

And Tom with Carmel:

She told him, astonishing herself, speaking things aloud she never had before, things she had scarcely even thought in the privacy of her own head before.

He listened as she described the way that her mind had split neatly in two between what actually was, and what she was capable of tolerating, and how the false part had taken over and dominated the other for those months. There were details he didn’t understand, logistics, about how she could take steps to hide her body from others to conceal the situation while also not actually acknowledging the situation to herself. (178-9)

What these characters do seem to know is that they do not know where their awareness — call it cognition, if you will — shades into true consciousness. “Self-consciousness,” and “self-awareness” are inadequate terms, because they involve self-alienation, self-departure, in the way that people try to leave themselves during trauma in order to escape terrible pain. The terrible pain in Ordinary Human Failings is that of being surrounded by intimates who are actually strangers, starting with oneself. This is the root of the fictional enterprise.

At the end, Tom Hargreaves gives up on his story and sends the family away. They return to their native Waterford, where it is possible to find out what they need to know, or at least some of it, and the catastrophe that propelled the family out of Ireland can be redeemed within it.

The young American, Silas Q Scuddamore, is in a spot. In his bedroom at a hotel in Paris, he has discovered a corpse. Luckly, a doctor is lodging in the next room, and the doctor comes up with a plan. The plan is smooth but all the same somewhat hard to believe. Scuddamore protests:

“Alas!” said Silas, “I have every wish to believe you; but how is it possible? You open up to me a bright prospect, but, I ask you, is my mind capable of receiving so unlikely a solution? Be more generous, and let me further understand your meaning.”

I had to put down the book at this point — Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights — to savor this extraordinary passage. Not so long ago, I would have joined the rest of the world in dismissing Silas’s outburst as overwritten Victorian mush — or gush, if you prefer. In my old age, however, I am reduced to raptures as ridiculous as the prose, which begs, begs on its knees, to be translated into Italian and set to music by Vincenzo Bellini. In doing so, I mean to laugh with, not at, Stevenson, whose eyes twinkle through the words. Com’è possibile? indeed.

I am not here to recommend reading the tales in this collection, which comprises Stevenson’s earliest fiction, but I will say that they all have the effervescence of virtuoso improvisation. You can feel Stevenson making things up as he goes along, gambling that he’ll be able to tie things up at the end. Indeed, this is what saves the tales from camp. And if his tying things up at the end is a bit brisk and even rough-edged, you don’t mind, because he is already bundling you off to the next tale, which will if nothing else recount the further adventures of Florizel, Prince of Bohemia and his faithful companion, Colonel Geraldine, knights of derring-do and virtue in the London of Jack the Ripper.

I don’t think that I should ever have come across the New Arabian Nights if I hadn’t read about them in Camille Peri’s new book about Stevenson and his wife, Fanny Van De Grift, an American from Indianapolis. Their improbable attachment, which involved literary collaboration in a second collection of tales, the New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, began outside of Paris and ended, as I think most people know, in Samoa. They married when Fanny was 40 and Louis (as Peri calls him) ten years younger. Louis’s writer friends were not keen on Fanny, to say the least, and she has come down to us as a headstrong drag on Stevenson’s already precarious health. In John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the two of them, she can easily be mistaken for a heap of carpet in the background. Sargent was obviously attracted to Stevenson, and Peri’s description sparkles with innuendo:

Louis, in his customary velvet jacket, paces away from [Fanny] in long strides, twisting his mustache and looking at the viewer as if suddenly caught in midthought. Between them, a door opens onto a dark hallway, suggesting tension. One senses that Sargent would have liked Louis to continue walking off the canvas and out of the domestic scene. (282)

The picture was painted at Skerryvore, the country house that the Stevensons rented outside of Bournemouth. Bournemouth was something of a seaside spa and it was hoped that the air would be good for Louis’s health. He was thought to be tubercular; in fact, he seems to have suffered from bronchiectasis. No big difference, given that his particular treatment for pulmonary hemorrhaging was relentless chain smoking. I’d always supposed that it was his respiratory affliction that killed him, but in fact he died of stroke. One way or another, the cigarettes got him. The amazing thing is that he lived to be 44.

Stevenson grew up in the prosperous New Town of Edinburgh, the only child of a lighthouse engineer who hoped to be followed in his profession by his son. All that came of this was the fictional shipwreck near Erraid, an islet off the Isle of Mull, in Kidnapped, an event that occurred more than a century before the erection of an actual lighthouse there by the Stevenson firm. Louis appears to have been a born writer, but of what was the question. His early inclination was to journalism, and if his work in this line did not contribute to his immortality, it honed his penchant for calling spades spades; his account of crossing the Atlantic in the company of Scottish emigrants in steerage was deemed to be unpublishably frank. Nonetheless, as the little excerpt quote above shows, Stevenson was writing at a time when literary English was suffering from paroxysms of theatricality. Stripping the language of Victorian grandiosity would become the true subject matter of most advanced English prose, particularly that of American fiction, throughout the following century. What saved Louis from unreadability was his choosing boys as his target audience. Treasure Island, begun in 1883, is told in a style that derives its power from undercurrents instead of eruptions; the preposterous indulgences of the New Arabian Nights (1877-80) have been put on a serious diet. The first draft was read to Lloyd Osbourne, the surviving son of Fanny’s first marriage.

While the adventures in Stevenson’s life were mostly imaginary, Fanny’s were all too real. She married Sam Osbourne, a bounder in the making, as a teenager, and followed him to the silver mines of Nevada, where the living was not easy; among other achievements, Fanny learned to make her own furniture. When Sam gave up silver for the law, the couple moved with their children, Belle and Lloyd, to San Francisco, where Sam continued to move around on his own. After about twenty years of his feckless infidelity, Fanny decided to take her children, of whom there were now three, to Europe, so that she could study art. (This voyage entailed a second traversing of the Isthmus of Panama; only upon her return to San Francisco could she avail herself of the new transcontinental railroad). She returned to California, although she had met and fallen in love with Louis in France — their meeting at Grez-sur-Loing, in the Fontainebleau forest outside of Paris, was as unlikely as any Western exploit — because Sam would not give her a divorce. Louis eventually followed her there. When Sam finally changed his mind, Fanny and Louis married, and spent their honeymoon at a mining camp in Silverado.

Peri argues that Fanny devoted her life to taking care of Louis, and her case is persuasive; what made it seem unlikely at the time must have been Fanny’s resemblance to Annie Oakley, the Girl of the Golden West, and Barbara Stanwyck all rolled into one little woman. Although petite, Fanny was basically, a tough broad, and even if she liked nice things, she never had the patience for ladylike airs. She and her second husband had formidable tempers and engaged in a good deal of basically companionate shouting.

The architecture of A Wilder Shore is superb, and the long, copious tale is well told. But there is a great deal of unimportant speculation: “The desolate Nevada wilderness that Fannie saw from the stagecoach must have seemed almost unearthly, with its dry lake beds and desert seas dotted by sagebrush and squat piñon pines.” (18) Amid these must-haves there is the occasional purple patch, not nearly as lovable as Stevenson’s:

But his strength had lifted her from the emptiness that must have felt like it would last a lifetime. She could not let him die now. She was guided not only by love, but by her firm belief that the world had not seen all that Robert Louis Stevenson had to give. (166)

Aside from A Child’s Garden of Verses — I was lucky enough to grow up with the delightful Golden Books edition, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen — I read no Stevenson until I was in my seventies. I had no buckles to swash in. I gasped for the air of consciousness, which was not to be found in the company of men. I read the Hardy Boys but would have preferred the Nancy Drews. I found happiness with Jane Austen in my teens. Austen would teach me that, regardless of the marriage plots, it is that quality of the  writing that determines the excitement. A lifetime of following her advice (via the enormous respect that Henry James had for the creator of Jekyll and Hyde, would finally take me to Stevenson, whom I would discover to be a surprisingly great writer, and not just a raconteur anticipating Conan Doyle or Joseph Conrad. I am grateful, however, to Camille Peri, for having introduced me to the New Arabian Nights, in which the ghost of Bugs Bunny lurking in the shadow of Stevenson’s muse has free play.

What is the origin of consciousness? The Hebrew Bible has a simple answer that everybody knows: it involves an apple. Of course it doesn’t involve an apple per se; apples are northern fruit that do not grow in the Levant. Figs would be more likely. The Hebrew Bible, and the Old Testaments, in no matter what translation, simply mention fruit. Meaning something to eat, presumably inviting.

Actually, they mention fruit only once, at Genesis 3.6: …she took of the fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband and he ate. (JPS) Consciousness was the immediate consequence:

Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they perceived that they were naked and they sewed together fig leaves and made themselves loincloths. (Gen 3.7; JPS)

You will object: But surely Adam and Eve were conscious prior to this horrible moment. I shall reply: you are confusing conscious with aware. Sadly, we have come to treat these as synonyms in English, much to our loss. Awareness is a faculty possessed by all living creatures, to however limited an extent; it allows them to respond to their environment. Consciousness, in contrast, is unique to human beings, and, as you will learn quickly if you take up French, it comprises what we call conscience. Julian Jaynes, in his wildly interdisciplinary study, The Origin of the Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1979), summarizes the difference between awareness and consciousness as, first, an awareness of the self, as if it were part of the environment; and, second, as the ready ability to narratize, or tell stories about that self in the environment. The first component is obvious in Genesis: they perceived that they were naked. The second, which involves the onrush of shame, has them sewing fig leaves into loincloths. Having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, Adam and Eve are not just aware of their sin; they are transformed by it.

From the very beginning, then, Judaism and Christianity associate consciousness with the loss of God’s companionship. That is pretty much Augustine’s definition of sin. Wrapped into this complex new consciousness is the knowledge that the sinners bring alienation upon themselves. Whereas awareness may be uncomfortable, consciousness is painful, at least at first, and we do what we can to push it away. In English, we actually banish it to the compound self-consciousness. According to my Dictionnaire Robert, the only French terms for this compound are timidité and conscient — the latter being French for conscious. In a way, it is impossible to be self-conscious in French. Just timid. No running away.

Much as I would love to dilate upon Julian Jaynes’s fascinating book, I am here to talk about a new novel, The Hypocrite, by Jo Hamya. It would not have been the same novel if I had not, by chance, been re-reading Jaynes when I picked it up. With Jaynes’s acute thinking percolating in my mind, I helplessly read The Hypocrite as the electrifying account of the infliction of shame. A man in late middle age is obliged to recognize that he has edited his awareness to protect his consciousness — his conscience. Not only has he sinned, but he has successfully avoided private disgrace by bleaching his offense to the point of its disappearance. This, and not his bad behavior in the past, is the sin that stings. When someone who remembers what happened tries to enlighten him — his daughter, Sophia (the only named principal character) — his irresistible impulse is to deny the clarification, to fight the raising of his consciousness. The man becomes incoherent, almost demented, with misery.

This story of perception and shame is embedded in a story with a larger perspective. We are asked to consider that neither the man nor his daughter are conscious of their common offenses against the larger world, offenses of disrespectful self-indulgence. This larger story is kept in the background; it obtrudes only twice, once in the middle and once at the end. In this perspective, the wrongs with which the man and his daughter are agonizingly concerned amount to little more than instances of punctured vanity. For the man is an esteemed novelist (albeit an apparently clueless one), and his daughter is a budding playwright. In a more typical family drama, the action of The Hypocrite would take place in the course of a family reunion and involve charges of child abuse. Here, the father’s crime appears to have been kidding himself into believing that his teenage daughter could not hear the after-hours shenanigans in his bedroom, and the setting is a West End theatre in which the daughter, now grown, literally dramatizes what she knew. The play is a comedy. The father has been invited to an opening performance; he sits through it, in sinking wretchedness, while the rest of the audience laughs unto tears.

There is a gravity in the texture of Hamya’s prose that, together with the intense presentation of her stories, forcibly reminded me of Ian McEwen at his very best (Atonement, Saturday, The Children Act); indeed, I now suspect that the pain of consciousness is perhaps his deepest theme. (A very good prompt to revisit them!) The power of Hamya’s writing is contextual and difficult to excerpt, but, for the record, I’ll call attention to the section beginning “It’s like cocktail-party conversation.” The bulk of this section consists of a long section in which the father tries to swat away the implications of the play that he is watching.

Other, terrible, thoughts. Has Sophia heard him come? He listens to the actor do it and decides, evidently not.

More urgent concerns supplant that notion. He has to chew them down. Sophia has, however indirectly, thought of him having sex. (69)

Here, at any rate, is a passage from the opening section of The Hypocrite, given over to a point of view, that of the mother, the ex-wife (but the then-wife, at the time of the passage), that will be implicated but withheld in the remainder of the novel. The setting is a Sicilian beach in the late afternoon.

The beach, the fat pulse of the sun and its resultant waves of light headedness. Sofia’s mother touched her watch. She imagined swimming. Thought about how to do dinner that night, remember dinner the night before — courtesy of her husband’s friend. Someone he hadn’t seen in years another writer, whose daughter had been paid €15 euros to look after Sophia. A table of eight other strangers her husband was excited to meet again. She sat on the far side of the arrangement, away from him. She could not keep track of their names, though evidently few people knew hers. That she had worried whether a sixteen-year-old she didn’t know was equipped enough to take care of her child. That it had been a night of not speaking, with a glass of red wine hovering under her chin by its stem, and recollections pooled by the others from university pubs she’d never been near. And — Aren’t you stunning? her least favorite of them said; gestured to the man she had married six years ago. Has he shagged you yet?

A pause. A smile. An argument on the way home.

This section is headed, “The Decision to Leave.”

A friend whom I see every week, and with whom I always discuss what we’re reading, has been saying pretty much the same thing for over a month: she’s reading another Joe Pickett novel by C J Box. She can’t stop. I’m not surprised: a mystery set in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, centered on the plight of a valiant game warden, is right up her alley, given her taste for the Old West. What’s strange is that I couldn’t stop reading about Joe Pickett, either, once I got started.

I’ve read only one: the first, Open Season. (Amazon helpfully identifies each novel’s place in the series.) When my friend began talking about Box, I thought to myself, “Not for me!” But how could I be sure without reading one. I ought to note that my friend has proved to be a reliable source of unexpectedly good reading (eg, Terry Hayes). I decided to buy Open Season on the understanding that if I didn’t like it, I would give it to my friend, for her to pass on. I ought to note also that, because she prefers to read on an e-reader, she hasn’t got any of the books to lend. She thought that this arrangement would be very kind. I’m going to give her Open Season even though I liked it very much: I haven’t really got room for it. That’s a polite way of saying that I probably won’t want to read it again. But I did really like it, and I’m happy to know that there’s plenty more where that came from.

What worried me was that the writing would not be very good, and, to be honest, on the sentence level (as they say in writing programs), the prose of Open Season is not exactly intriguing. In a few places, it is actually leaden.

Joe walked with Wacey out to his pickup truck. Wacey stopped and stood in the dark before getting in. Wacey had brought an unopened beer with him, and Joe heard the top being unscrewed. (141)

Most of the time, however, the writing is briskly effective, and the story is told very well, even when it is plain to see where things were going. As I went through the book, I detected such evidence of wordsmith expertise as the use of “elder” (correctly) where most writers would settled for “eldest,” and a comfort with the occasional subjunctive. All things considered, I concluded that the leaden bits were intentional, and not a form of dumbing down. On the contrary, I take them to be a crutch for the reader who is addicted to skimming. The dialogue is invariably fluent; Box and his editor know what readers are likely to skip over. The series’s many fans are deserved; Box writes a lot better than several male best sellers I can think of.

And this is not a book about the Old West at all. It takes place in the Wyoming of gated billionaires, where pipeline proposals face grueling scrutiny from regulators and environmentalists, and the last phrase environmentalists want to hear is “endangered species.” Box is extremely thoughtful about the tension between the effective protection of animals by those who know what they’re doing and the interference of those who mistakenly believe that they know better. It may be that the most effective form of regulation is simply informing agents on the ground of the regulatory objectives, and to hold them responsible for implementing the best methods. And, at the same time, unionizing them in order to protect them from predatory profiteers. But there, I’ve belabored the point far more than C J Box would: he’s the more graceful critic of this problematic, anything but old-fashioned issue.

On a tip from a friend, I read Ayşegül Savaş’s new novel, The Anthropologists. Savaş is a Turkish writer, educated in the United States, who writes in English. She now lives in Paris. The Anthropologists is her third novel. I thought that, before writing about it, I would read the second novel, Walking on the Ceiling. 

The earlier book is about Nurunisa, or Nunu, a woman who, at the time of writing, is a sort of journalist for a Turkish magazine, working in an Istanbul that is no longer the place she grew up in — it is, of course, the Istanbul of Erdoğan; the Gezi Park riots are already an ugly memory — a place, she writes, that was “popular around the world” for a while. I was lucky enough to visit the Istanbul  in those days, and it was indeed a city vibrating with possibilities of a bright future. As it was also one of the oldest cities in the West, I found it to be immensely interesting, and I daresay it still is, despite everything. One thing that, according Walking on the Ceiling, hasn’t changed is that Istanbul remains a city tinctured by loneliness and melancholy. You don’t have to read Orhan Pamuk to sense this, even on a simple walk down İstiklal Avenue. Loneliness pervades the short chapters of Walking on the Ceiling, more than half of which are set in Paris.

Nunu has spent a year in Paris, more or less as a flâneuse. (Her finances are not discussed.) There, she meets an English writer, whom she calls “M.”; M. has been drawn to her vibrant native town and written several novels about it. He is now an old man, tall, stooped, and grey; he teaches writing at the Sorbonne (even though his French isn’t very good, according to Nunu). Nunu encounters him at a bookshop event, more or less picks him up afterward, and goes on the first of many long walks with him. That is the full extent of their relationship: they meet up, usually at the Luxembourg Metro stop, and go for walks. Sometimes, they stop at a café, and sometimes they have little picnics. They talk but are often silent. She tells him stories about her family and her life — or at least that’s what she says they are — and he professes to admire them greatly. They exchange emails; it is a studiously unthrilling attachment. Nunu wants to play a bigger part in M.’s life, but this appears to be unlikely to happen. Eventually, Nunu slips, and is later mortified to discover that her fabulist invention is detectable as such. Demoralized, she retreats to Istanbul, as if to prison.

Savaş is a suggestive writer; she knows how to present M. and Nunu as writers who share a literary friendship without actually telling us very much about their conversations. This air of unexplained implication sustains a mood of profound loneliness. We have no idea why M. would be lonely, but Nunu, we learn, has had a troubled childhood. Her father, a good man but a disturbed poet, killed himself when she was a little girl. Her mother, whom Nunu has just buried before her sojourn in Paris, also seems to have been somewhat disturbed — abstracted, anyway, and not cut out for motherhood. Both parents appear to have been cut off, for obscure reasons, from vital contact with their communities’ values. Nunu herself is clearly detached. For her magazine, she writes profiles of the world’s great cities that are intended to provide her readers with a bit of escape, the hope that there is a better life elsewhere.

But the combination of hints, vignettes, and evasions — in the early chapters, Savaş can be seen again and again to swerve away from a topic that she has just raised — combine to make the famously wispy Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon read like stark social realism. One hesitates to say that Walking on the Ceiling is insubstantial; its subject, after all, is loneliness, specifically the loneliness of the writer, even in, perhaps especially in, the company of writers. But it is a sad novel that left me with that now bygone foreign-movie sense of the free-floating sadness of life. It is not a novel that I would recommend to most American readers, at least to those who aren’t women under the age of thirty. I would also make an exception for Americans who have visited “popular” Istanbul. “Paris was a city full of people having meals,” Savaş writes, but she does not paint it as a city full of Parisians. She barely paints it at all. Seen mostly as a destination for outsiders, it might almost be a space station. Whether intentionally or not, Savaş’s Istanbul upstages the City of Light as an interesting, romantic spot, eminently fictionable.

The Anthropologists is quite a different book. It shares short chapters and a certain evasiveness with the earlier novel, but that’s all. The evasiveness is pretty much a matter of non-specification. The novel takes place in an unidentified European city, and the characters have unidentified backgrounds. All but one of them are foreign to the city, but we don’t know where they come from, either.  (The friend who recommended the book agreed with me that the city is not Paris.) I can imagine Savaş’s calculations, and her decision to keep her narrative uncluttered, at the risk of teasing readers. I would have concluded otherwise, because the novel also flirts with cuteness by presenting its chapters (even shorter than the ones in Walking on the Ceiling) as unnumbered sections with recurring, somewhat academic headings, as if to suggest notes taken toward the writing of an anthropology textbook. Once again, the novel is rather short. While I didn’t want Walking on the Ceiling to be any longer, I’d have been happier if The Anthropologists were twice as long, which I think is a compliment. I don’t want to imply that Savaş left out anything important.

Asya and Manu have been together for a while. They met at university and have lived in a few small towns before settling in the big city, where they rent an apartment. They have a small assortment of friends. (Their acquaintance are not discussed.) There is Ravi:

We recognized in him something we recognized in each other: the mix of openness and suspicion; a desire to establish rules by which to live, and only a vague idea about what those rules should be. (7)

This is a very important observation, and I shall come back to it. Lena is the couple’s one “native” friend — she comes from a suburb of the city. Asya meets her at a party given by people whom she and Manu “didn’t really like,” (Nothing is made of this dislike, however,  whenever the people reappear.)

We talked the entire picnic, relieved not to be socializing with the rest of the group, while trying to decipher people’s connections to one another. Lena said that she was embarrassed to have landed at the picnic of someone she didn’t even know — she had come along with one of the other guests, who’d abandoned her to join his close friends. But she said it so cheerfully, and I was intoxicated by her clarity. 13)

Clarity, alas, turns out not to be a hallmark of Lena’s character.

The arc of the novel begins in the couple’s decision to buy their own home. Money is no more a problem for Asya and Manu than it is for many young urban couples. They both make goodish livings, and childlessness, which appears to be a side-effect of other factors, not a decision, has enabled them to put together the makings of a down payment. Throughout the novel, they will look at several flats; the current owners’ reasons for selling, which have to do with changes in life rather than the properties’ drawbacks, will get more attention than descriptions of the amenities.

Upstairs from their current rental lives Asya and Manu’s neighbor Tereza, “old in body but not in mind.” Tereza’s place is rather fancier than what the young couple are used to.

But we soon relaxed. We pulled up our feet on the sofa, served ourselves from the kitchen. We realized that Tereza didn’t keep track of manners; what mattered to her was conversation. Manu and I had no spare sets of plates or matching glasses, but we had plenty of discussion in our lives for Teresa, ours was a true wealth. (24)

Tereza treats Asya and Manu as an old auntie would, and this is the third thing to bear in mind. All three of the “important” factors that I have enumerated, plus the search for a home to own, make it clear that Asya and Manu are at a peculiar, very tender phase in their lives. It is a very common phase but so quick and delicate that few people remember it, except when they look back and think about a time when their situation was so different. This phase is nothing less than the last moment of youth. By the end of The Anthropologists, a new apartment has been found, but the other everyday circumstances of life, except their jobs and their mutual affection, have  been damaged, without a discernible villain other than the settling of character in the passage of time.   From now on, openness, suspicion, and confusion about the rules of life will not be an attraction. I’ve seen it happen a million times.

Even if there were nothing more to The Anthropologists than what I’ve outlined, it would be an important book. But there’s plenty more. There’s the texture of give-and-take between Asya and Manu, and their sense of humor; and also their relationships to their parents. (Asya’s are divorced, giving the couple three sets of in-laws). There is Asya’s project as a documentarian, excerpts from which dot the book; they’re interesting but not distracting, and of course they give point to the title. The chance to see a fine talent develop from one novel to the next — from an elegant impressionist, Savaş has grown into an acute observer — is more than worth the time. But watching two young people negotiate the tricky rapids between youth and adulthood that no one ever sees coming and few ever recall is the most beguiling treat of all.